On the British television service Freeview, there’s a channel called Talking Pictures, which shows old films from the early twentieth century, as well as later cult classics. This morning, I watched a low budget hot rod/ monster/ science-fiction film called The Giant Gila Monster.Whatever happened to that sub-genre?
It was less than terrifying, the monstrous lizard being rather amusing, but the acting was fine, the script surprisingly true to life and the characters were easy to root for. Curious about its making, I looked online, and found this comment in the Wikipedia article on the film:
Dave Sindelar, on his website Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblingsgave the film a positive review. Sindelar wrote in his review of the film: “whatever flaws there are with the story, I find myself drawn to the regional feel of the movie, and especially to the likeable characters that inhabit this environment…. It’s rare for a movie to have this many likeable characters, and I think the reason I watch the movie again and again is because I just like to spend time with them.”
This set me to thinking about which literary fictional characters I’ve enjoyed spending time with, especially repeatedly in a series of stories. As a writer, it sounds like an obvious prerequisite that readers should like your characters or at least bond with them to the extent that they want to know what happens to them. Thus, the fate of villains is compelling; a character doesn’t have to be a clean-living paragon of virtue to be admirable.
With my own Cornish Detective series, my protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle is likeable, though he’s definitely weird, and his left wing, green and arty approach to life will alienate some readers—which is fine with me—they might read on to see him get his comeuppance.
Books themselves can become friends and the characters in them become allies to us in the loneliness of life; we want to know how they’re getting on after we were last together.
In my chosen writing genre of Crime, some of my favourite likeable characters include:
Of the three, Commissario Salvo Montalbano would be the most convivial company, for the other two are rather tortured souls. Harry Hole is a trouble-seeking nutter!
In cinema films, the characters I relate to the most, and who I’ve watched repeatedly, are The Outlaw Josey Wales, played by Clint Eastwood, Blade Runner Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford and the Alien series Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. It’s arguable that all of these movies are Westerns, with an antihero as the protagonist—which might be a clue to my own bolshy character!
Who are your favourite fictional characters in print and on the silver screen?
Some time ago, I posted a homage to the semicolon, but just recently, I’ve noticed another endangered punctuation species…they’re not really Full Stops or Periods or Ellipses, so I’m going to call them Dots—as used in abbreviations.
I first noticed their disappearance when writing one of my Cornish Detective stories. My protagonist detective’s investigation into a serial killer was interrupted by the secret services of America and the United Kingdom, who took an interest, as some of his victims worldwide had been employed by them. I went to type F.B.I. and M.I.5 and the U.S.A. and the U.K. and it all looked too dotty—interrupting the flow of reading—typing the abbreviations without dots looked wrong too! To check, I accessed the FBI and MI5 websites, and sure enough, they’ve dropped the dots, as have most government sites!
When I was taught punctuation and grammar, back in the 1960s, abbreviations were always dotted. These days, they’re fading away, though m.p.h. for speed, and the common a.m. and p.m. to denote before or after midday correctly hold onto their dots, but mm is acceptable for millimetre, and a simple C and F for Centigrade and Fahrenheit suffices.
I also found that PAYG is now used for Pay As You Go mobile phones. And, BDSM does without dots, but keeps its knots!
Overall, the trend in punctuation is for a cleaner look, partly through laziness, avoiding having to hit an irksome key by pressing Shift. This simplification has affected other punctuation marks. It’s long been common for American speech marks to be a single ‘, while Brits used a double “. I was taught that the single ‘ mark was specifically for use when quoting what someone had said in the past, while double “ marks indicated speech for those present in the scene. Nowadays, it’s unusual to see double speech marks.
No one wants to put readers off by a page filled with a blizzard of squiggles, dots, curves and dashes so the simpler way of writing things might be a good move—provided it doesn’t cause confusion over the information being imparted.
Have you noticed any trends in punctuation?
I’ve discovered where the missing dots are going! Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama is famed for her colourful paintings, sculptures and installations featuring thousands of dots!
his Evening Standardarticle discusses writing courses and three recently published how-to guides.
The £4,000 fee for the Faber Academy course Writing A Novel is a strong indicator of how to make money from writing—run a course, writers’ retreat or online pay-for tuition or editing services. Remember, far more suppliers of mining equipment, clothing and food supplies got rich during a gold rush, than hard-working miners themselves.
What a reader finds shocking, even objectionable, is going to vary, though unusual and excessive forms of sex and violence are the best ways of attracting attention to a book, especially for a debut author.
A writer can have fun with ignoring the rules of orderly writing, if it’s their characters who are using incorrect grammar, repetition, split infinitives, double negatives—which can be attributed to their poor education—not yours!
I’m in two minds about self-censoring dangerous information…after all, it’s no excuse to say that it’s available to anyone who searches the internet when you’re presenting it in an easily digestible form in your fictional story.
Not every creative artist agrees, as this interview with Quentin Tarantino demonstrates, when he tears into Krishnan Guru-Murthy, for daring to suggest that the violence depicted in his movies encourages copycat crimes.
Shocking novelists include Irvine Welsh, whose stories feature grotesque scenes full of foul language. Sometimes a novel can be deemed to be so obscene or controversial, that it gets banned, even provoking a criminal trial—as happened with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Salman Rushdie pissed off Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini so much with his The Satanic Verses, which supposedly contained blasphemous references against the prophet Muhammed, that he pronounced a fatwa calling for his death…which theoretically is still in place. It’s estimated that it’s cost £1,000,000 a year to protect him.
In my Cornish Detective series, I’ve written about some shocking things, including murder, human trafficking, incest, prostitution, rape, drug addiction, kidnapping and detailed descriptions of autopsies. These elements are part and parcel of modern-day crime novels—readers expect them—what would have outraged the public fifty years ago is now commonplace entertainment. Some readers will still be shocked by the bare details, though I try to unsettle the others by describing the perpetrator’s attitude to their crime—which can be disturbing for their lack of empathy and any sense of guilt.
One thing that I like to do with my stories, is to wrong-foot the reader, by making them sympathise with a villain. A serial killer was an ex-sniper, used to spending days camouflaged in the landscape, waiting for his target to appear, and he’d developed a love of wildlife, especially birds. I also gave him some physical ailments, that readers could relate to.
Another serial killer, who’d taken a victim once a year for forty years, only eliminated hardened criminals, some of whom had escaped justice through legal technicalities. He slaughtered paedophiles, rapists, drug dealers and terrorists—did that make him evil or an unacknowledged superhero of justice?
The antagonist in my latest story is a cultured art gallery owner, who’s killed three people, including his brother, to protect his paintings. He interprets life through his art collection, shunning people socially and only interacting with wealthy collectors. He’s a misanthrope, more specifically a misogynist who detests women—always thinking the worst of them, and his thoughts are vile. They’re the opposite of my own attitude, as I was raised surrounded by warm and nurturing female relatives; I’m sure that some readers will interpret my story as meaning that I’m a male chauvinist hog, but such are the risks any writer runs.
I’ve not justified my villain’s prejudice against females, though I have gone some way towards explaining it. When he was 10 years old, his mother disappeared to New York with her lover, totally abandoning her family, never contacting them again. His father is a withdrawn concentration camp survivor, who works as a funeral director embalming corpses. He offers no emotional support. One time, as a teenager, my villain unexpectedly encounters a naked female corpse in the embalming room, before being ejected by his father—who punishes him by making him write a religious essay based on a painting called The Light Of The World, by William Holman Hunt. This pushes him away from any hope of religious redemption, and he turns to the dark side.
I based this scene on real-life crimes, where boys, who went on to become serial killers, spent too much unsupervised time with the bodies of close female relatives, laid out in the parlour of their homes—as was once common practice in the early 20th-century. They became acquainted with death in female form at animpressionable stage in their emotional and sexual development.
Anyhow, my baddy thinks things such as:
“The painter served her purpose and had been fairly paid for her daubs. With just enough skill to imitate an untrained artist from the 1920s, she’d become a liability. Her disappearance would be put down to a return to drug addiction. She had to go: she’d been trying to see through the shutters of the shop. The mop-headed boy she’d been dating asked around about her, but had taken up with an old flame…easy come, easy go. Temptation was everywhere, with so many alluring holidaymakers in town for a week or two of pleasure.
The killer had tupped a boatload of them, when young, dumb and full of cum, but that was a distraction he’d abandoned, now that he was an established member of the art colony. He still appreciated a good-looking woman, and he had admirers, but they were all gold-diggers, divorcees and widows mainly, on the hunt for someone to provide them with an easeful old age. Peddling pussies that were past their sell-by date, they’d spread for bread, offering gash for cash, with not a smidgin of sincerity in their soul or an ounce of love in their hearts.
The wind on his face was refreshing. He spent too much time indoors, which had given his skin a pallor but prevented the sunbaked wrinkles of sun-worshippers. How being the colour and texture of an ancient tan handbag could be considered healthy, was beyond his understanding.“
He’s a supposedly civilised man, who’s extremely uncouth; undoubtedly a sociopath.
Of course, the things that characters say can be shocking in a humorous way. Sitting in a pub one evening, minding my own business, I overheard a group of women in the next booth talking about their partners’ physical attributes. One called her husband “Tripod”, which made her friends giggle as they asked if he was that well-hung? “Not really,” the woman replied,“it’s just that the important third ‘leg’ keeps collapsing and letting me down!”
Part of the problem with modern stories is judging the balance between describing the reality of how people live and endeavouring to narrate a story that has literary aspirations. Critics like to shuffle realistic depictions of 21st-century urban living into the vague category of Working Class Fiction. Most people have ignoble thoughts, from time to time, imagining the worst and sometimes saying things that they regret, or pretend to regret, or won’t take back. Capturing such outrage in fiction is tricky.
Do you have any favourite famous novels that shocked you with what the author expressed from their own standpoint or through what their characters thought and said?
Have you written any characters who are absolutely vile?
Or, who say outrageous things in a funny ‘you can’t say that’ way?
In writing any fictional story, we need to persuade the reader that the world we’re creating is believable, and the things happening to the characters in that world are feasible—so they accept that it could happen to them—meaning they bond with the characters and want to know what happens to them. The bond can be one of dislike, of course, for to be successful a novel needs a great villain.
A good story should have incidents which defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.
To encourage readers to stay on the journey of reading your story, rather than get on with their own lives, the characters that inhabit the page have to show their humanity. Fictional characters need to be extraordinary to attract interest in the first place, but it’s their vulnerabilities, dreams and setbacks that make readers sympathise with them. No one likes a smart arse in real life or in fiction. The detectives, superheroes, sexual athletes and knights in armour we create should falter as much as we all do, before achieving their goals.
Iain M. Banks said: The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.
That’s also the joy of writing fiction, for as writers, we lead our readers by the nose, tugging at their heartstrings along the way and teasing their brains to work out what happens next. They have to be drawn into the story, to trust the integrity of the plot and care what happens to the characters. One thing that might well drive them away, is if they spot glaring mistakes—be they continuity errors, such as getting a name wrong, or factual blunders.
I write crime fiction, and about half of the novels I read are of this genre, so I’m alert to mistakes. I’ve given up on reading novels where it was obvious the author had never been in a physical fight in their lives, and had no idea of how to describe one, where they’d specified the wrong calibre of ammunition for a gun, or had their hero shadow a suspect’s car along a lonely desert road for 250 miles without being spotted (or needing to refuel their gas-guzzling V8-engined car). My favourite piece of ridiculousness, which destroyed any sense of belief I’d built up, was when a parked Harley-Davidson motorcycle, weighing 600 pounds, fell over after being shot through the petrol tank with one bullet—as if it was a person—“Urggh, yer got me!”
Even if you’re writing about fantasy or science-fiction heroes, keep things real.
I’ve found that writing from the third person POV allows a cooler approach than introducing a tale in the first person, which is intensely close. A reader needs time to bond with the narrator, and third person gives an impartiality which doesn’t force them to think in a certain way. On the other hand, stories with unreliable narrators need the first person viewpoint, however twisted their thoughts are, making the reader work out the truth of what they’re saying. I previously questioned the effectiveness of unreliable narrators, for if all of the characters are unlikeable, then why should readers continue to support a tangled web of disbelief full of spiders that are all biting you?
Many plots depend on coincidence and lucky accident to work, but that’s just the way of fiction, and provided the happenstance isn’t too convenient and unbelievable, then readers will play along. I freely admit, that my own protagonist detective is a miracle worker, who’d make Sherlock Holmes look like Inspector Clouseau, for he solves complicated investigations within six months. In reality, a major crime team might take years to bust a criminal, but that would try A reader’s patience—unless it’s ‘faction’ based on actual crimes.
Keeping the attention of the reader requires immediacy, they like having things explained to them, especially if they’ve already guessed why something happened. This is a damned sight more than what happens in real life, where stuff just happens without our permission, and we have to sort out the mess!
Suspense within a story, whatever the genre, makes readers eager to know the ending. The questions we raised at the beginning need resolution by the time we type The End.
E. M. Forster put it well: Story as such, can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault—that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.
If you make the reader feel something about your story, to have an emotional reaction to it, then they haven’t noticed you as a narrator (transparency is our ideal state) for they believe in the truth of what you’ve written.
There are trends in storytelling, which spawn imitations. J.K. Rowling’s success with wizards led to a rash of similar books. Fifty Shades of Grey lubricated the thrust of mummy porn. More recently, there have been a host of novels with unreliable narrators, the best-known being The Girl on the Trainand Gone Girl.
Unreliable narrators have been around for ages, in such classics as Lolita, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby andThe Catcher In The Rye. What goes around comes around, but I’ve found the recent novels told through the POV of a severely compromised narrator to be poorly written. This hasn’t stopped them selling in their millions, with film adaptations.
I had to force myself through The Girl on the Train, just to see what happened in the end. It’s not just me being grumpy, as others have criticised Paula Hawkins’ abilities.
She’s got a new novel out, Into The Water, which I haven’t seen a good reviewof yet. Critics’ unfavourable opinions won’t stop it becoming a bestseller, that also gets adapted into a Hollywood film. It’s galling to realise that novels which become popular only do so because readers are intrigued by the concept, not caring about the skill of the writing and that they buy a book because all of their friends have—it’s a social phenomenon—never mind the quality, feel the width.
For me, the main problem with Paula Hawkins’ and Gillian Flynn’s unreliable narrators was that I didn’t care what happened to them, or to the characters they interacted with, as most of them were weak, irritating and nasty too. Overall, I finished these bestsellers feeling depressed for the human condition.
I’ve written using an unreliable narrator in just one of my novels, so far. The Perfect Murdererwas told from a multiple POV, including the detective protagonist, his team, a pathologist and the suspects they were hunting. One was a serial killer, whose bizarre slayings aroused the bloodlust of an unsuspected career murderer, a retired chief of detectives who’d murdered a harden criminal every year for forty years. He was a member of the establishment, and the hardline views he expressed about crime didn’t suggest that he’d been taking things into his own hands. I differentiated between his thoughts and those of the serial killer by calling the latter ‘the killer’and the old copper ‘the murderer’.
I thought this device was obvious and guessable, so was pleased when my three readers were shocked at the twist in the tale. The copper’s ramblings and his homicidal campaign of retribution were caused by a brain tumour, which he escaped by committing suicide before he was arrested. Although he was a difficult man to like, and severely flawed, I managed to make him sympathetic.
Whatever you call it—relics, paraphernalia or realia—the objects discussed verge from touching to revealing to downright macabre. It smacks of trophy-taking to me, in the same way as serial killers keep mementoes of their victims…a button, lock of hair or body part!
There has to be a limit to what collectors will hoard (and admit to owning), based on taste and decency. Would the stones, that Virginia Woolf weighed her already heavy overcoat down with, be collectable? Her suicide letter certainly is. What about the empty shotgun cartridge shell, that once housed the pellets that Ernest Hemingway used to blow his head apart? Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima committed seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelling himself with a sword—is that blade a literary relic?
Having seen how a writer’s life and career are turned into a thriving business, when my nearest pub was Jamaica Inn, on Bodmin Moor, famed for Daphne du Maurier’s novel, I’m somewhat cynical about how some authors get deified. Having fifty coachloads of tourists visit a building every day, just because it was used as the location for a story is an odd way of showing devotion. In the UK, similar things occur with the Brontës, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Wordsworth. Whole tourist industries depend of people wanting to visit the homes of writers and places where they set their books, even if the tourists haven’t read the novel and only vaguely remember the film adaptation.
From time to time, an auction lot will receive publicity in the media, as being the desk of a famous writer, and some of them go for eye-watering prices.
All of this glorification of buildings, working tools, personal possessions, and even body parts and death masks, made me wonder what the hell I could leave behind for posterity—assuming, of course, that my Cornish Detective series brings me adulation!
Perhaps the scraps of card, that I cut from teabag and cereal boxes, to make on-the-fly notes about my WIP would be endlessly fascinating….How about the cooling cradle, that’s kept my ancient laptop functioning for nine years? My faded plastic library card has helped to preserve my sanity and being Cornwall Libraries, it carries an attractive photo of an abandoned engine house.
Getting personal, taking a death mask of my fizzog would be tricky, owing to beard and moustache, though my hands have been praised,by various girlfriends, for being attractive, and they sure do a lot of typing. My skin is as wrinkled as crumpled tissue paper, these days, and I wonder if the impressive scars (from fights and workshop accidents) would show? Failing that, I could break out the Viagra and go the Plaster Caster route…it’d be something for visitors to hang their coats on!
What literary relic would you leave to your adoring fans and academic scholars?
Keat’s death mask: sold at auction in 1996 for £16,100.
Vladamir Nabokov suggested that: “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
It’s common advice from writing coaches, to endanger your protagonist, to set them challenges that they need to overcome to get to where they’re going—which is often simply returning the situation to normal. Think of what Frodo went through in The Lord of The Rings, just to get rid of that pesky ring.
No one likes a smart arse, and a completely indomitable hero would be boring, running the risk of making their opponents more appealing…which is always likely to happen anyway, as readers identify more with character flaws than moral strength. Fighting the system is more romantic than defending it. Far more murderers’ names are recalled, than the lawmen who captured or killed them.
A protagonist becomes more attractive when they show their humanity. If they make mistakes, especially if the reader knows they’re doing so and they don’t, it elicits sympathy and the reader gets behind their efforts. Such vulnerability needn’t make the hero sappy: we all know what sort of hand a velvet glove contains.
Some authors take their abuse of their protagonist to extremes. Jo Nesbö regularly throws his Swedish detective Harry Hole into ghastly situations, including being addicted to booze and drugs, getting captured and tortured, as well as framed and suspended from duties, beaten-up, stabbed and shot. In the first novel of the series The Bat, Harry is a fish out of water, investigating a serial killer in Australia and is also drinking like a fish!
I introduced my protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle standing on a Cornish beach in winter, looking at the nude corpse of a naturist, who appears to have been murdered. He’s trying not to think about the last time he was there, with his wife, who died in a traffic accident two years before. Hopefully, readers will sympathise with his state of mind, while admiring his fortitude in pursuing the killer.
He clings to his job as a way of coping with life, as he spirals down into depression, and it’s not until the end of Book 2 that he’s functioning anything like normal. He’s been brought low by his illness, but his detective colleagues have also faced threats—his ageing deputy is mugged and knocked unconscious and kickedhard enough to break ribs, prompting his retirement. In the next book, his replacement becomes the last victim of a serial killer, pounded to death with a primitive mace—a club with nails. On another case, a detective’s personal life is disrupted when a murdering husband and wife, disgraced intelligence agents with a grudge against society, hack into her emails. They glean enough information to attack the police force’s site, disrupting the investigation into them.
Various coppers get clobbered while making arrests, but Neil is cleverly poisoned by the ex-agents, who use poison-dart frog toxin to knock him out, sending him into hallucinations. Inthe last story, completed in 2018, in the penultimate chapter, Neil is stabbed and slashed, defending himself by almost battering his assailant to death with an extendable baton.
He’s in intensive care at the close of the story, in a coma and receiving blood transfusions. He faces suspension for his attack on the swordsman—who’s died.
I enjoyed putting my protagonist in jeopardy…burying him in an avalanche of violence with consequences for his career.
What rocks have you thrown at your characters?
How are they damaged by the threats to their life?
Various famous authors have said things about conscience and the writing process. Chekhov claimed: “I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.”
Joseph Campbell, a key figure in writing theory, showed a little more restraint, but not much: “Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
Anne Lamott is more inclusive of her conscience, stating that taking a stance adds to the beauty of the work: “Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.”
Leo Tolstoy advised: “Beware of anything that is not approved by your conscience.”
In writing stories, we have to choose where we stand.
The internet offers the ultimate get-out, absolving an author of responsibility for revealing information, for after all, if it’s online anyone could find it. Filmmakers have long been accused of inciting real-life violence by showing it on screen, with arguments that it does and that it doesn’t.
Film directors can get very touchy about the issue:
Do your stories have a message for good? It needn’t be heavy-handed and preachy
Or, do you worry that your book might deprave readers?
They say that “Clothes make the man.” Modern-day research has proved there’s a lot of truth in this old adage, with people making snap judgements based on what someone is wearing.
In my Cornish Detective series, I tend to avoid giving elaborate descriptions of my characters’ clothing. With the rugged landscape of the county, my coppers dress practically for the conditions, and my protagonist, Neil Kettle, favours leather jackets, sturdy Gore-Tex-lined walking boots and a full-length wax-proof Belstaff coat when it’s pouring down.
He also wears ‘costumes’ appropriate for his leisure activities, of motorcycle riding (full leathers), painting (an artist’s smock) and gardening—when he tends to go bare-chested, wielding his scythe on a meadow he’s growing, in Ross Poldark fashion.
Other detectives on Neil’s team have their own tastes in clothing, with one homely detective (the sharpest of the bunch) looking like “she should be baking a cake on a television commercial”, while her female colleague a lesbian ex-nurse, who’s a brown belt in karate, prefers form-fitting clothing that allows her ease of movement, as she “prowls like panther.” Neil’s second-in-command is British-Asian, a city lad, unused to the country, who’s trying to fit in by clothing himself in brogue shoes, corduroy trousers and tweed jackets from the farmers’ outfitters. A rugby-playing detective constable is huge, “as big as a wardrobe” and forced into buying clothing from a Big Man store. They all wear stab proof and bullet proof vests when going to make an arrest.
Despite their different clothing tastes, they all still look like coppers when out and about, which is one reason that Neil enjoys riding his chopper, dressed as a biker, as no one thinks he’s a policeman.
With my fictional villains, a serial killer is a master of disguise, from his time as a sniper in war zones, so wears camouflage outfits that blend into the landscape. In public, he strives to be unnoticeable, wearing bland clothing bought from charity shops, and regularly changing it, along with altering his facial appearance by the use of facial prosthetics and full head vinyl masks.
At the opposite extreme, the owner of a chain of massage parlours is a narcissistic self-publicist, favouring a gold lamé suit, golden-tanned skin from sunbeds, chunky gold jewellery and a gold Jaguar XJ8.
In my last novel, one of the witnesses is a heavily-muscled sculptress, who wears undistinguished dungarees and a T-shirt while pounding on granite to create a bust, but her arms are sleeved with ink from colourful tattoos. The antagonist of the story, an eccentric art gallery owner dresses as if he’s time-travelled from 125 years ago. He’s obsessed with paintings, preferring them to people, and has retreated to Victorian times in his attitude to women, foreigners and in what he wears. He favours handmade shoes, cufflinks, wing-collared shirts, hand-tied bow ties, three-piece suits, pocket watches and a silk-lined woollen cloak; to read anything, he perches pince-nez spectacles on the bridge of his nose.
As a break from writing novels, last year I penned the second tale in what will become a quartet of short stories about an American Civil War veteran. He’s trying to rebuild his life, as his country does the same thing in the Period of Reconstruction. Dressing him required much thought and research, for it was a treacherous time of divided loyalties—just because a peace treaty’s been signed doesn’t mean to say that the war has stopped raging in ex-soldiers’ souls. In a time of great poverty, many old warriors wore a combination of ex-army uniforms, treading a fine line over what was acceptable. My protagonist is suffering from PTSD, ever alert for ambush and has made himself into a walking arsenal, with weapons hidden all over his body. He’s modified his clothing to allow quick and easy access to revolvers, knives and a sawn-off shotgun. His full-length duster coat conceals a lot.
The lead character in a short story I wrote, about a man falsely accused of killing a young woman whose body his dog found while out on a walk in the country, is a retired-locomotive driver with zero interest in looking fashionable. He dresses for comfort, doing his own clumsy repairs to waterproof clothing, unaware of how peculiar and intimidating he looks…which becomes a factor in the case that’s built against him. I was inspired by an extraordinary photograph of the man who would be King—Prince Charles—wearing his favourite wax-proof coat covered in repair patches.
Have you created any characters fashion victims, obsessed with wearing the right label?
How do you decide what the protagonist of a fantasy story wears?
I’ve only written one story set in space, on Mars in the 23rd-century, and one of the trickiest aspects was getting the space suit, helmet and boots right. If you write sciencefiction, do you gloss over such details or do they become an integral part of the story?
What do ghosts wear? Presumably, their historical clothing gives them away.
